Italian council bans mafia TV show

Lizzy Davies

THE northern Neapolitan suburb of Scampia is notorious for its drug wars, clan battles and ever-growing casualty list.

But the long-suffering area was at the centre of a rather different kind of conflict at the weekend after a war of words erupted between its local politicians and Italy's most prominent anti-mafia campaigner over the filming of a follow-up television series to the 2008 hit film Gomorrah.

In what he said was an attempt to protect the area and its inhabitants from bad publicity, Scampia's local council leader, Angelo Pisani, will not allow cameras into the neighbourhood to make the drama, which is to be called Gomorrah after Roberto Saviano's chilling expose´ of the Neapolitan underworld, which in turn spawned Matteo Garrone's film.

''It is time to say enough of the exploitative use of Naples and this area in particular,'' Mr Pisani told the Corriere del Mezzogiorno. ''The constant exaggeration - only of the negative things, which exist, it cannot be denied - solves nothing; on the contrary, it worsens the problems and confirms the stigma.''

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The mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris, said that while he played no part in Mr Pisani's decision, he supported it. ''We are tired of seeing Scampia reduced … to a place of conquest for the warring Camorra, as if nothing else existed in Scampia beyond the drug-pushing and the feuding clans,'' he said.

To Mr Saviano, however, the Naples-born writer and scourge of the Camorra, this smacked of ''pure, sly censorship'' aimed at deflecting attention from the problems of Scampia and politicians' inability to solve them.